2001: A Space Odyssey with added extra orchestra… March 9, 2013

Even today it seems to possess a power – at least to me, that puts so much that came after it in the shade (though oddly the film it reminds me most of is Stalker by Tarkovsky, another firm favourite – something to do with the use of silence as a central dynamic). It’s not that the vision of the future as seen from the 1960s was predictive, it wasn’t, it was vastly too ambitious. Nothing short of its total implementation would suffice. But that that vision somehow hasn’t lost its power despite being unfulfilled. It – for want of a better term – looks real (and generally raises in me the complaint: when are we going to have proper spaceships like that?). A possible future. And that’s no small achievement.

There’s also the paradoxical aspect of the lack of emotion of the actors, something that Kubrick deliberately played up, and the emotional cachet of the score – at points humourous, awe inspiring or near enough terrifying (as with the Star Gate sequence).

Consider the following trailer where the voice over is so superfluous as to almost make a mockery of the film…

(By the way, check out the intro to 1980 SF film Saturn 3 for a shameless – ahem – ‘reworking’ of Also sprach Zarathustra…).